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Illustration by Arnie Bermudez
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Arizona Daily Wildcat
Friday, January 16, 2004
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Things you always never wanted to know
From the Middle Ages until the 18th century, the local barber's duties included dentistry, blood-letting, minor operations and bone-setting. The barber's striped pole originates from when patients gripped the pole during an operation.
The Castillian and Burgundian flags of Spain, the Mexican Flag, the Confederate flag and the flag of the United States have flown over the land that became Arizona.
When Einstein published his equations of general relativity, he failed to notice that his theory predicted an expanding universe. A Russian mathematician, Alexander Friedmann, found that Einstein had made a schoolboy error in algebra that caused him to overlook a solution to his own equations. In effect, Einstein had divided by zero at one point in his calculations - a no-no in mathematics.
The touring Peter the Great shipped back to Russia the Dutchman Frederich Ruysch's collection of 1,300 fluid-preserved examples of natural history - fossils, rocks, plants of many varieties - and embryonic stages of humans and animals. By the time the collection arrived in St. Petersburg, the sailors had drunk the brandy in which many specimens had been preserved.
The Amazon River pushes so much water into the Atlantic Ocean that, more than 100 miles at sea, off the mouth of the river, one can dip fresh water out of the ocean and drink it.
One president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, which specializes in cancer treatment, has observed that "ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment." Writes Dr. Lewis Thomas: Ants "farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves. The families of weaver ants engage in child labor, holding their larvae-like shuttles to spin out the thread that sews the leaves together for their fungi gardens. They exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television."
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